Coaches and failure: Sydney Nixon

Hey there!

I’m Sydney Nixon, I’m a third year Keener and I’m 16 years old. I have been kayaking for roughly 3 or 4 years, I’ve been training and focusing on freestyle for the past year and a half now after placing first in the junior girls division of the Canadian Freestyle Team. I live only 6 hours from the Ottawa River so I’m here often however I've been traveling a lot lately for competitions. I’ve gotten into competing recently under the discipline of Freestyle Kayaking specifically. I’ve been to a few competitions now including the Go Pro Mountain Games, Payette River Games, CKS Paddlefest, 2013 World Championships and more. I have goals of placing on the Canadian Freestyle Kayak Team again this year on Labour Day. Following the competition there I will travel to North Carolina for the Pan Am Games which are the weekend after!

Claire O'Hara watching us surf at Push Button

One of the many reasons I decided to come back to Keeners for a third year was because of the incredible coaching opportunities. I have been fortunate enough to have previously had chances to be coached by all of the instructors who will be here this session. All of them are all around amazing people, personalities in addition to some of the best kayakers and coaches in the world. Coaches this session include Stephen Wright, Clay Wright, Devyn Scott, Nich Troutman and Claire O’hara. Working with these coaches is a unique experience as they all have different things to offer each Keener. Stephen's flat water routine is infamous with keeners and it translates to almost every trick and technique used on the river. Clay always throws in parts about reading the river and current as well as technique. Devyn and Nich are both Ottawa locals. Devyn can airscrew on any wave you could possibly find and Nich has a level of stoke that is unrivalled. Claire is a very useful person to have around as well being that she's a girl and smaller and can explain things in a way that girls with less muscle than the guys can understand. As well as this, she's an amazing kayaker and is very good at explaining what she's talking about and recognizing the individual talents and skills of others no matter how big or small.

Monday night at speech night, Stephen gave an amazing speech about failure. The bottom line of what he said was that without failure, you're never going to get anywhere. A lot of people these days have it so ingrained into their minds that failure is not acceptable that they would rather not risk it than take the chance at failure. He said that for every sucess you have, there will by 50 times more failures behind it. He also said that every success is made of countless failures. He's continued to keep this in our minds by continuously telling us that we've failed at an attempt and other ways which sounds horrible but it's only a reminder that we're one failure closer to being better. Failing at something is a natural thing in life and you'll never learn if you're not ready to take failure standing up and keep trying again and again after hundreds of failures. All of the coaches are amazing at celebrating small victories as well as big ones and they recognize that even small ones are a huge accomplishment for some people.

A main goal of mine is to get some bigger tricks down for team trials and improve my wave boating a lot. I am ready to take failure again and again because I know that every time I fall on my face trying a trick, I'm one fall closer to getting it. To quote another Keener from their speech (Jordan) people will clap 10 times louder and harder if you fail spectacularly than if you do something super awesome.

        

        You can follow me at my newly started blog at this site: http://sydneyjeannixon.wordpress.com/ as well as here for the next couple weeks!

Cheers,

        Sydney